Monday, July 14, 2014

I have been a regular visitor to the Gate's personal blog for a couple of weeks and I am always amazed by his Reading list, trips and continuous philantrophic feats around the world.
I am compelled to share his review of his favourite business book,a book with a captivating title. I also share a link to downloading a free chapter of the book. As a matter of fact Gates created an instant it for this book after he revealed to the world it's hi favourite!
The book is out of print but sure amazon is your answer ;)
Read on!

The Best Business Book I’ve Ever ReadBY BILL GATES ON JULY 12, 2014

Not long after I first met Warren Buffett back in 1991, I asked him to recommend his favorite book about business. He didn’t miss a beat: “It’s Business Adventures, by John Brooks,” he said. “I’ll send you my copy.” I was intrigued: I had never heard of Business Adventures or John Brooks.

Today, more than two decades after Warren lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published—Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read. John Brooks is still my favorite business writer. (And Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy.)

A skeptic might wonder how this out-of-print collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s could have anything to say about business today. After all, in 1966, when Brooks profiled Xerox, the company’s top-of-the-line copier weighed 650 pounds, cost $27,500, required a full-time operator, and came with a fire extinguisher because of its tendency to overheat. A lot has changed since then.

It’s certainly true that many of the particulars of business have changed. But the fundamentals have not. Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then. In terms of its longevity, Business Adventures stands alongside Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the 1949 book that Warren says is the best book on investing that he has ever read.
Brooks grew up in New Jersey during the Depression, attended Princeton University (where he roomed with future Secretary of State George Shultz), and, after serving in World War II, turned to journalism with dreams of becoming a novelist. In addition to his magazine work, he published a handful of books, only some of which are still in print. He died in 1993.

As the journalist Michael Lewis wrote in his foreword to Brooks’s book The Go-Go Years, even when Brooks got things wrong, “at least he got them wrong in an interesting way.” Unlike a lot of today’s business writers, Brooks didn’t boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won’t find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters, and show how things went for them.

In one called “The Impacted Philosophers,” he uses a case of price-fixing at General Electric to explore miscommunication—sometimes intentional miscommunication—up and down the corporate ladder. It was, he writes, “a breakdown in intramural communication so drastic as to make the building of the Tower of Babel seem a triumph of organizational rapport.”
In “The Fate of the Edsel,” he refutes the popular explanations for why Ford’s flagship car was such a historic flop. It wasn’t because the car was overly poll-tested; it was because Ford’s executives only pretended to be acting on what the polls said. “Although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in.” It certainly didn’t help that the first Edsels “were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn’t open, and push buttons that…couldn’t be budged with a hammer.”
One of Brooks’s most instructive stories is “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox.” (The headline alone belongs in the Journalism Hall of Fame.) The example of Xerox is one that everyone in the tech industry should study. Starting in the early ’70s, the company funded a huge amount of R&D that wasn’t directly related to copiers, including research that led to Ethernet networks and the first graphical user interface (the look you know today as Windows or OS X).

But because Xerox executives didn’t think these ideas fit their core business, they chose not to turn them into marketable products. Others stepped in and went to market with products based on the research that Xerox had done. Both Apple and Microsoft, for example, drew on Xerox’s work on graphical user interfaces.

I know I’m not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox’s part. I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft. I pushed hard to make sure that we kept thinking big about the opportunities created by our research in areas like computer vision and speech recognition. Many other journalists have written about Xerox, but Brooks’s article tells an important part of the company’s early story. He shows how it was built on original, outside-the-box thinking, which makes it all the more surprising that as Xerox matured, it would miss out on unconventional ideas developed by its own researchers.

Brooks was also a masterful storyteller. He could craft a page-turner like “The Last Great Corner,” about the man who founded the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain and his attempt to foil investors intent on shorting his company’s stock. I couldn’t wait to see how things turned out for him. (Here’s a spoiler: Not well.) Other times you can almost hear Brooks chuckling as he tells some absurd story. There’s a passage in “The Fate of the Edsel” in which a PR man for Ford organizes a fashion show for the wives of newspaper reporters. The host of the fashion show turns out to be a female impersonator, which might seem edgy today but would have been scandalous for a major American corporation in 1957. Brooks notes that the reporters’ wives “were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories.”

Brooks’s work is a great reminder that the rules for running a strong business and creating value haven’t changed. For one thing, there’s an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect product, production plan, and marketing pitch; you’ll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans.
That is a lesson you learn quickly in business, and I’ve been reminded of it at every step of my career, first at Microsoft and now at the foundation. Which people are you going to back? Do their roles fit their abilities? Do they have both the IQ and EQ to succeed? Warren is famous for this approach at Berkshire Hathaway, where he buys great businesses run by wonderful managers and then gets out of the way.
Business Adventures is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of leaders in challenging circumstances as it is about the particulars of one business or another. In that sense, it is still relevant not despite its age but because of it. John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

The Long Silence...
I wondered what took me off from writing and blogging for a long while- over two weeks except for my 'Happy new month' post.
Could it be work? No, could it be my creed to focus on a particluar project at hand - that will likely take the whole of this month and perhaps a slight part of next? Perhaps it's my new found love for doing a bit of stock analysis online with all indicators I could lay hands on. Could it possibly be my business at EMMANDUS Networks or my exciting MLM busines of A2W? Certainly it could be the need for a new mobile device?

It takes Disicpline!
Anyways while all of the reasons listed above could or might have been an excuse but none is no good reason for not doing what makes me happy- writing and sharing inspirational contents with my clan on my blog on a regular basis. Sure, I believe being cut off my smart mobile device for a couple of weeks have in a large extent affected many things so I can't wait to get the next 'PDA'. Great people do not make excuse ! So I choose to own up that I haven't been disciplined enough to show up and bring inspirational content to the table every day, every other day or at worst every week. You see no 'busy' schedule is an excuse here! Successful people choose to make time for what is important to them and that is what I must do too. Apologies (to who?) if I sounded too hard on myself.The good news is I can always right the wrongs, I did that before and I sure can do it again and again and again and....

NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!
You see the truth is it takes discipline and hardwork to blog consistently (and of course for other endeavors), but however how hard it seems it is not impossible! I know a couple of personal development bloggers who blog daily or at least weekly. So it becomes more interesting to me when I keep up with the challenge and I get rewarded each day by the thought of sending out some inspiration into the world daily- that alone is motivating to me.
Yeah it could take some time to research but then a wole lot of time, it is just in the deposit or in the air and I only need to just reach out for it, because God has placed it there.
But you know most times we get too lazy or run of focus and fail to do even the simplest things that make us happy and which in effect add value from a larger perspective.

A STEP PER TIME WILL DO THE MAGIC
Yeah! That is the secret, like every great goal, I will begin with the end in mind and we all can.I will write an article after another, I will create another video, record another podcast and do one more book review and then the next. I will take a step after another knowing fully well every little step is important to the whole journey.Afterall it's all part of the plan!

If you read all through this conversation with myself, my profound appreciation and perhaps I should share with you a wonderful book by brian tracy called GOALS and All you need to do is ask for it. As a summary the keys to consistent success in any endeavor are Discipline, Possibility and consistent small actions!